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Accepted Paper:
Evicting people, redistributing agency: the aftermath of the ‘housing political’ learned inside Roman organized squats
Chiara Cacciotti
(Polytechnic and University of Turin)
The paper explores how former inhabitants of organized squats in Rome navigate the aftermath of eviction and politically redistribute and recontextualize their agency based on the ‘housing political’ learned inside squats.
Paper Abstract:
The ‘housing political’ has primarily been studied as a contested zone where the fight for just housing intersects with the urgent domain of life sustenance, facing ongoing and constant expulsion from public space, the threat of eviction, and the violence of law and bordering regimes, among other issues. However, limited analytical attention has been given to what happens to squatters’ lives and their political agency after being evicted from buildings organized by housing movements, referring to the housing trajectories undertaken and the potential maintenance of radical practices. The purpose of this paper is to delineate the key historical, political, and existential frameworks underlying the past and ongoing geographies of post-evictions from organized squats in Rome, conceptualizing the latter as continually affective processes (Doboš et al., 2023). Consequently, home is considered not only a matter of physical infrastructures and relationships but also a collective political and pedagogical experience that shapes the agentive capabilities of individuals. Although eviction serves as a vehicle for social depotentiation and displacement, the paper focuses instead on how people deal with the aftermath of it and how they politically redistribute and recontextualize their agency with the ‘housing political’ learned inside squats.